Sid Meier's Civilization VIReview

Every game in the legendary, 25-year-old Sid Meier’s Civilization 4X strategy series puts a new spin on the grand concept of taking a nation from a single nomadic tribe to a world-dominating superpower, one turn at a time. In that way Civilization VI looks familiar, but it’s loaded with some very smart and bold improvements that give it new levels of depth. Once I get absorbed into a campaign it becomes so engrossing it’s difficult to think about anything else.

Under its colorful, cartography-inspired art style and varied, stirring music that swells to accent what you’re doing and in what era you’re doing it, Civilization VI is crammed with an almost overwhelming number of systems. It’s got trade, it’s got religion, it’s got espionage, it’s got Great People, it’s got archeology, it’s got the kitchen sink. For the most part, that’s awesome because there are so many chances to build out your nation in different ways to take advantage of opportunities on its randomly generated maps and pursue the different victory types, and it’s all baked in at the ground level so that things like trade routes don’t feel tacked on and optional (they are, in fact, the only way to build roads in the early game). This feels like a Civ game that’s already had two expansions.

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That can make the first few games feel overwhelming, even with the tutorials. The tutorials are good, but the amount of decisions you’re prompted to make from the very beginning of a game that will have significant impact on your late-game success is intimidating. That said, as an experienced Civilization player I got up to speed relatively quickly and, on my second playthrough, was able to hold my own on King difficulty without understanding everything. I still feel like I’m learning more and more with every game.

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A lot of depth emerges from the new city-building system.

A lot of depth emerges from one of the key factors that distinguishes this Civilization from the five that came before it: the new city-building system, in which key buildings like markets, temples, and barracks that have traditionally been built in nearly every city to give them basic functionality have now been broken out into 11 types of “districts” (Commercial Hub, Holy Site, and Encampment, among others). Those districts must be placed on tiles within a city’s borders, and the number of districts you can build is limited by the population of a city, so you’re forced to specialize each city’s function. You might have one city that’s focused on generating science for researching new technology, another focused on creating wealth, and another that builds your military units with experience boosts – or maybe you go full military and build an Encampment in all of them. It creates a lot of possible paths.

What’s more, Wonder buildings (which can only exist in one city in the world and grant big bonuses) also occupy tiles, and many are limited by geography because they must be placed next to a river or a mountain or other terrain, or they have prerequisite buildings you have to build first or adjacent to. All of this cuts down on previous games’ Wonder spam, where one high-production city could crank out wonders quickly, and forces you to build them around your more diverse empire. It’s also great that Wonders are so large and visible on the map, and that they come with impressive in-game animations of their construction.

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Because we’re playing on randomized maps every time, effectively laying out your cities’ districts and Wonders is a challenging puzzle. There are loads of tradeoffs to consider, but the biggest is asking if you’d be better off building a district or a Wonder or working the tile they’d occupy for food and production resources, potentially allowing your city to grow bigger in the late game. Those are decisions that always feel like they matter.

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The land-grab phase feels urgent and exciting.

Also, in a reversal of Civilization V’s empire-wide happiness level system, in Civilization VI each city’s happiness has reverted back to being individually determined, and is based on how many amenities it has available – happiness is created by luxury resources or happiness-generating buildings (plus a number of other factors). That means rapid empire expansion is back on the table because you don’t need to worry about the founding of new cities having a major impact on the productivity and growth of your major ones, as long as you’re settling in areas that have enough luxury resources to support them. In fact, settling as many new cities as possible feels all but mandatory if you want to be competitive, which makes the land-grab phase of the early- and mid-game eras feel urgent and exciting.

Speaking of the mid game, the changes Firaxis has made to reduce unit clutter from that point on are extremely smart. The first problem in most Civilization games has been that at a certain point you (and all the AI players) get stuck with a dozen or so automated Worker units sitting around idling with no more city tiles to improve, which just makes turns take longer to calculate if you don’t manually disband them. In Civilization VI, Workers (now called Builders) expire after they’ve been used a few times – three, by default, but that can be expanded by government policies or wonders – they’re no longer hanging around doing nothing. And if you need a new one, they’re quick to build and affordable to immediately buy with gold. They can’t be automated, either, which makes the decisions of where to spend their limited charges feel meaningful again as well.

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Secondly, when Civilization V switched from allowing you to stack military units onto a single tile (as had been the custom through Civilization IV) to limiting you to one military unit per tile it created a more tactical kind of combat, but also caused an enormous traffic jam when you built a large army. Civilization VI gets that under control by finding a great compromise between stacks and one-unit-per-tile: once you research certain technologies you can combine two and then three identical military units into a single, more powerful corps or army unit (not entirely dissimilar to Civilization IV’s Warlords). Thus the number of military units taking up space and blocking paths in the late game is sharply reduced by a half or even two-thirds, if you choose to take advantage of it. AI armies are also reduced, which means they have fewer things to shuffle around on their turns.

Those AI nations are each guided by one of the 20 available leaders, and each of them has agendas that guide their behavior. That gives diplomacy some much-needed transparency that’s long been missing in Civilization games. Once you’ve established a relationship with a leader through cozying up or espionage, you can see why they’re happy or angry with you and what steps you might be able to take to change that. Egypt’s Cleopatra, for example, likes other civilizations who have strong armies, and Queen Victoria likes nations that started on the same continent as England. They also have a randomized second agenda, such as preferring countries that have a high population or hating those who have more money than they do, so they’re unpredictable in every new game. It’s a big step toward demystifying their behavior.

Some of these agendas are irrational, such as Queen Victoria disliking when you colonize a continent she has her eye on (there’s no way to know which one) or German Emperor Frederick Barbarossa getting mad when you interact with City-States (which you’d have to go out of your way not to do), so it’s basically impossible to not anger someone at some point when you’re simply going about your businesses of taking over the world. But you can mostly balance those offenses out by establishing embassies, conducting trade, respecting treaties, or just being friendly. The one downside I’ve encountered is that in order to see what their motivations are you first have to have a level of access with them, and if you meet a new country in the mid game that dislikes you for unknown reasons it’s very difficult to establish a good enough relationship to find out why they were angry in the first place. And they’re not entirely consistent – they’ll sometimes go from seemingly friendly to aggressive, presumably because they saw an opportunity they couldn’t resist. (To be fair I’ve been guilty of that one myself.) And one time I saw what must’ve been a bug, where an AI first hated me for having a small navy but then for a few turns thought I had a huge navy before realizing I’d never built a single ship and going back to hating me.